Manufacturing

Creating Connected Factories

Today, manufacturers face intense global competition and a variety of complex business demands. By continuing to run factories and plants with many single points of failure, operational silos, gaps in communication and poor visibility into the real-time health of the process, manufacturers are missing out on substantial gains in OEE and profitability.

Without interrupting proven, on-the-floor processes, we can help you remove single points of failure and operational silos, gain insightful, real-time visibility, and empower your workforce with mobility and collaboration tools to help you realize what is known as the Connected Factory.

The Connected Factory is a secure, agile solution that delivers substantial profitability gains by significantly improving operational visibility, availability, quantity and quality. Subsequent integration of internal visibility of production operations with external supply chain and logistics operations gives you the power to analyze and act on information relative to the entire operation.

Adding a network layer between the shop floor and traditional enterprise IT provides you with a fault-tolerant communications infrastructure, removing any single points of failure. This means fewer network disruptions and higher up-time.

Solid network architecture in the manufacturing space serves as the foundation for everything else: visibility into the real-time production environment, communication both within the manufacturing plant and the larger organization, as well as big data collection and analysis.

Using technologies such as virtualized HMIs, servers, and applications, the Connected Factory helps you decrease the instance of common software or hardware failures while simultaneously enabling you to recover much more quickly when failures inevitably occur.

Instead of having to physically access individual servers or HMIs, we can help you create a consolidated and powerful control center for your operation. By virtualizing aspects of your factory, you can better avoid unplanned outages and reduce planned outage windows.

Data is everywhere: the challenge is collecting it and turning it into something useful. By equipping your manufacturing plants with the right architecture and tools, we can help you make your data visible and useful.

Big data enables you to perform predictive analytics and preventative maintenance, giving you the tools and insight into ways to increase OEE and make improvements to your internal and external supply chains.

We can help you create a cyber and logical security strategy to protect your data and prevent intrusions into your networks and systems. This helps minimize outages from unauthorized access and actions, whether they be internal or external, intentional or unintentional.

By leveraging your existing architecture, we can help you add the devices necessary to give your operational technology staff the visibility they need to know when changes are made to their network.

We also can bring staff up to speed on the fundamentals of control systems security like network segmentation, firewalls, identity services, deep packet inspection, sandboxing, endpoint protection, compliance and analytics.

Extending the solution set with mobility is powerful for the workforce. Providing your workers with mobility solutions (tablets, mobile workstations, etc.) enables them to operate throughout the plant.

Trouble on one production line can be reviewed from anywhere, not only at a physical workstation. Mobility solutions can also give workers mobile access to critical operational and procedural information such as technical diagrams, factory procedures, and access to Subject Matter Experts for help as needed.

WWT will be at GE's Minds + Machines and we're looking to make a splash on the exhibitor floor with our unique demonstration. Stop by our booth #26 to see our demonstration in action and speak with our experts.